We both saw them for the first time at the launch of their EP Malware. This photo of the aftermath gives a flavour for the gig. It was like a demented kid’s party. The energy, comedy, mania, ideas and colours, made us want to make music videos for them straight away.

For Craig’s video he wanted to reproduce the feeling and aesthetic of that live performance, and use it tell one of the video’s stories as densely as possible. We both have a love of absurd humour and heightened reality, so it was also a good opportunity to push Gorillabot’s silliness to a new level.

So began weeks of Craig working with Art Director, Amy Holden, to fill up Craig’s house with a series of cardboard sets and props. At the same time I was building my own bridge to wear for a star cameo.

After a lot of pre-production, Craig was ready to move everything into Yamination Studios to prepare rigging, set dressing and rehersals.

The shoot was loads of fun, or at least from what I saw it was. I spent most of the day alternating between wearing a globe and a bridge on my head. We also had a great cast of friends and regular collaborators filling out the video, so a huge thanks to them for dedicating their time. Similarly to all of the crew who helped everything run smoothly. I’m particularly impressed with how DP Paul McHale, and assistants Lewis Morgan and Liam Morgan worked together to capture everything and somehow keep it all in focus.

After that, it was down to the long hard post-production slog. While there are a lot of practical effects in the film, we wanted to digitally enhance them past what is physically possible in order to pull the rug from under the audience so that they felt like anything could happen. My way of thinking about the visuals in this film is that Benbot believes he’s a robot and that this whole scenario is a fantasy acting out in his mind in a basement somewhere. It’s childlike with sinister undertones.

Another role of the visual effects was to create a sense that the film was happening in one take. A lot of time was spent creating transitions that flowed well while trying not too hard to completely hide them. I’ve seen a lot of videos where they hide cuts perfectly, but as soon a seam appears it feels like you’ve seen behind the magic trick and it’s a little disappointing. I wanted to do a good job hiding cuts but I was more interested in making the audience want to go with the flow over seamless trickery.

Part of that was adding elements of interest in the more dramatic edit points. Loads of dust and smoke to make the scene more chaotic. Also the key to a good transition in these cases was to use elements before and after the two cuts so that it’s not totally clear what is being cut to and from.

Most of the transitions were largely a case of making the camera flow nicely. All it takes is for a slight camera jitter, then your eye catches it and you’re taken out of the flow.

As well as creating things that weren’t possible in real life I wanted to make the situation look like a health and safety nightmare. The whole film is about Benbot innocently trying to have fun but causing death and destruction without realising. Also, in the mid-point of any long music video it’s good to have lots of explosions and fire to keep the audience going.

It wasn’t planned for the solo to have extra sparks, but the reaction of the actors to Benbot lighting his one small sparkler was great and I wanted to make it look like they were in genuine danger.

There were more subtle elements that were added to help the flow. On the day some of the call and response sections from the crowd didn’t quite register visually. So I went into my vault of green screened characters from Gregory Is A Dancer and laid them into scene. Craig even managed to get his director cameo in the process. A lot of attention also went into the grading. We shot on RAW so I was able to correct the lighting frame by frame to make sure everybody was well exposed. The set ups were so quick moving and extreme that we couldn’t have planned to have even lighting everywhere so it was nice to have that element of control.

The last step was adding a ton of reactive lighting to create the sense of a live gig. The nature of the shoot meant we mostly had practical Kinoflow lights so it was nice to bring those to life at the end.

It was a really fun project to collaborate on and I’m looking forward to the next Gorillabot video. And of course I’m now available for any grumpy bridge character work going.

Last Autumn we were asked by Creative Black Country to make a half hour film documenting their groundwork groups presented by Fizzog’s Dancing Grannies.

The aim was to make something that was fun and could be shown in front of all of the community groups at a party, which would be a rare chance for all of them to see what each other do. In some cases it would also be a rare chance to have some respite from their routine.

A gonzo-style exploration was the inspiration for a loose narrative to link the disparate groups together. Fizzog’s Dancing Grannie characters would also be able to disarmingly bumble into the groups they came across. Fizzog knew their characters so well that it made it very easy to improvise interviews and break out of character when necessary.

The main priority was that interviewees were in on the joke, felt comfortable and were respected. A lot of work was done to make sure they knew what was about to happen and who we all were. That way Fizzog could lead a rambling conversation with no pressure on the interviewees. The relaxed, messy style often brought out the funnier confident sides in people. We also made sure we had a tiny set up so that we didn’t crowd out the groups. Craig Bush shot everything, with Paul McHale standing in one day. Pete Styles recorded and mixed the sound. Fizzog rocked up in costume. I directed and produced. In practise, it meant that the day started off like a little tea break with all of the interviewees being privy to any artifice, which could have caused confusion otherwise.

In terms of any plot, we only had to bookend the film with some motivation and closure. The bus stop idea came about purely from the amount of dancing we’d already filmed and having to fit a new location into an existing filming day. It summed up their role in the film nicely, but I only realised the Gregory Is A Dancer rip-off till afterwards. Anti-Social Bus Stop Dancing should just be a thing that is in all films. Everything in between was them discovering stuff they didn’t know.

What made the project special was that everyone working on the film were also discovering stuff. I’m relatively ignorant to what’s going on in the Black Country and the groups by definition were ‘hard to reach’. We went to some spaces and buildings that are hidden gems, people were going through things that we’d never had to think about, and there were some incredible acts of selflessness.

About 3 years ago outside a coffee shop, Ian got some croissant on his face and a silly sketch popped out fully formed. The main challenge was how to attach structurally unstable croissants to a face. We asked Twitter and THE Bob Mortimer told us “copydex”. If sticking stuff to your face is good enough for them it’s good enough for us. After Croissant’s first screening we heard Bob had ‘fallen’ and underwent a triple bypass. Sorry it took 3 years to make Bob.

This summer we wanted a nice excuse to work with our clever mates and have something to show at a couple of festivals. We settled on Croissant, which at first felt more like a sketch, but there were so many weird elements to it that there was a reason we hadn’t braved it yet.

We feel that animation and live action should only be used when they’re most useful. It would have been easy to make a 2D cartoon, but that wouldn’t have had much impact beyond the amusing concept. The aim was to make the film purely funny in every aspect and have the audience feel the escalation is spontaneously happening right there. However that’s achieved through quite a technical way. The actors and their chemistry have to fit with the correct surrounding. There needs to be some sort of relationship subtext so that you can care about why they’re angry/confused. The transformations should look shoddy but believable. The pastry levels have to increase in the right increments. The roaring torrent of jam has to be a punchline that can’t be topped (I would have liked more jam).

It felt like it should take place somewhere like a roadside cafe. Maybe because roadside cafe’s feel like strange limbos, but probably because we like greasy spoon cafes. As for actors, Tom Reid was always going to be our number one croissant. John Henry Falle was so impressive on DuckManBoy that we had to find a way to work with each other again. Together, Tom’s small performance versus John Henry’s jangly, booming performance was brilliant to watch.

PROPS:

Next thing to work on was the Croissant head. After a while of painting and glazing, the smell of stale reference croissants started to make me think I had a painted an actual huge croissant.

The squirty eyes were made under the wisdom of Chris Randall. I turned up with some pingpong balls, jumbo syringes, tubing and twelve jars of cheap jam. Chris immediately rolled up his sleeves. The first test was a thick jam fail. Cordial made a lot more sense and could wash out. We also got bonus Doctor advice to shorten the tubes for less resistance.

I enquired about a custom croissant handlebar moustache and eyebrows with a French patisserie, but realised it was easy enough to just bake/grill puff pastry to make sturdy but flakey facial hair.

Post-Production:

In the script there was no specific dialogue or clear cut emotional ramp until the obvious big transformations. Capturing the spontaneity of the performance took priority so I threw out continuity in favour of building and layered the performance in the edit. It took about 2 edits to realise this. Up to then, the performance felt consciously cut and snarky. Once the continuity was ruined it was quite freeing to do the ‘croissant choreography’ from scratch, even though this meant removing and adding croissant on most of Tom’s shots. It also meant I could really start experimenting with the rhythm of the edit. The emotional build up of the characters became much clearer too. John Henry’s nervousness is brewed up by Tom’s stupidity to the point where you can see why he would crack. It took a lot of time and we debated whether we should have done things differently, but the only way round would have been a day of rehearsals we didn’t have, or tons of retakes which might have killed the atmosphere.

Craig’s framing on the shoot really captured Tom’s performance and built the tension, but all of my edit meddling lead to inconsistent framing. This meant that half the shots were reframed with tracked background plates. That sounds like an unnecessary amount of work, but it gave the scenes a flow by steadily pushing the camera back and forwards on Tom. By the time I’d gone this deep I went the whole way and fixed a couple of continuity errors, rubbed out jam tubes and rubber bands, painted Tom’s face, and made his butter fascinator melt.

Making a jam torrent that would smash into Tom without a ruining the cafe was another hurdle. Genius Chris Randall came to the rescue again. He had the idea of turning Tom on his back against a green screen and pouring jam from above to give the illusion of lots of gravity defying force. Otherwise we’d need to bodge together pressurised equipment full of jam. Buckets full of watery jam were a lot easier.

Crew:

We had one of the nicest teams we could have had for filming in such a tight space.

We’ve done stuff with Craig Bush for a few years now. We share a lot of the same humour and he was the one that chose Croissant as the next film.

Pete Styles is a great sound designer and recordist and wehad wanted to work with him for a while. He’s one of the loveliest guys going, and since shooting this Craig, Pete and me have got to keep the fun going on a few location shoots.

Beth Lowes was amazing and one-upped Bob Mortimer’s ‘Copydex’ with ‘eyelash glue’. We’re really grateful that she chose to use her Sunday to share Tom’s head as a craft project.

Also a huge thanks to Kings Sandwich Bar in Kings Heath. After recceing around town and scouring Google Maps, the only cafe that was closed on Sunday, happy to film, and had the world’s best mural of a full breakfast, was just a mile up the road. Thanks to Lucy from King’s for cameoing as the waitress too.

After finishing DuckManBoy, and other projects we can’t chat about yet, we thought it was time to finally make a showreel. It’s also been about 5 years since starting production on Man In A Cat. Since then we’ve created stuff for Channel 4, Nickelodeon, BBC Comedy and Oxfam, and worked with some amazing people in the process.

That was fun. Everything is with Italian 60’s Pop.

It’s also been 6 years since my last freelance reel, so it’s nice finally showing off what I’ve done for other people between our Dice work. More Italian 60’s Pop:

We’ve also got a new website design and silly Dice ident to suit us better. We’ve always had an awkward relationship with the formality of ‘Dice Productions’. It’s like an embarrassing band name that’s too late to shake off. So, instead of starting again we’re styling it out with a silly rubbery neck, yellow paint, and a slide whistle.

It’s great to finally have Gregory Is A Dancer out in the open. Big thanks to everyone involved again, and to everyone who watched it.

It’s interesting how much work and accuracy needs to go into something to make it look silly and shambolic. The tracksuit combinations alone took a lot of consideration.

Kirby Skankwas played on a loop for days as our rehearsal and dance track, with Bob Mortimer providing a bit of inspiration. We knew Rob had cracked the score the day it finally pushed that skank out of our heads.

Gregory Is A Dancer is our second Random Acts film for Channel 4 and was commissioned by Balletboyz. This was our first live action commission but still has an animated sensibility and contains the same surreal approach we use in most of our work.

Part of our pitch was for this to be an ‘anti-dance’ film. However it still needed to be entertaining and work physically to deliver the right emotions and comic timings. That’s where Tom Reid came in. He’s an incredibly talented comic performer with a lot of physical control. Rehearsal sessions helped us find out which parts of the dancing could be pushed and where it needed restraint. To over the top and it would look too staged, losing the humanity in the performance. To small or too loose and there was nothing to hang the scenes on. Although Tom would say that he just based it on how Louis dances. After one of the funniest days ever spent on or off a set, it was obvious that nobody else could have brought what Tom did to the film, especially under the low-budget conditions and filthy tracksuits he had to endure.

Having almost no dialogue we re-united with Rob Connor to help tell the story through music. The general idea was for the film to be perceived as a driving music video that happened to match the emotional beats of the music. It was a nice process of starting with our points of reference, particularly our rehearsal track, and hearing Rob slowly build up different ideas and changing the nuances of the track to capture the tone of the story.

We looked at different ways to show so many scenes with our tiny budget. After first being put off by weekend hire of green screen spaces, we realised that a small kit green screen filmed at one end of our studio offered a garish, shabby feel that suited the main character’s upbringing as well as pulling the sleazy glitz of stardom down to the same level. Using flat lighting rather than matching up the environment light also enhanced the feel of all of the characters not quite fitting in their disjointed world. Keying and compositing was then a tricky balance of retaining green screen artefacts and the cheapness of the production while making sure it was slick enough not to be distracting.

Quirky symmetrical single-point perspective has been very much done but it was a very convenient way to reinforce that this film is all from the main character’s simplistic point of view while being surrounded by the things that have made him.

Recently I was asked to write for the good folk at Shooting People about film. So after a small amount of head scratching I thought I’d tackle the thorny issue of networking. I see it as an important part of making your way through film, but people get it so, so wrong.

Shortly afterwards I was happy to receive a few follows on Twitter and some praise from readers. They were either naturally polite, sensible folk or they’d taken on some of the points I was making in the write up. Either way, all good.

But then I got an email. It is the type of email that not only makes my eye twitch a little, but that prompted my article in the first place. A reader of the Shooters blog got in touch with Louis to say “Great article! Here is my script for a film. Can you make it into an animation please?”

This is annoying on many levels. One, they thanked the wrong person for the blog post. That’s lazy in the extreme. Two, there was no introduction so I still barely know who this person is. Three, they had a fundamental misunderstanding of the system to assume we could just make an animation for them. Four, the manner of the contact, and the content, went against every point I had made in the blog post. Either they didn’t read it, or they didn’t understand it.

Suffice to say, they got a rather short response asking them to re-read the article.

So, what can we learn? The first thing is to read things carefully. The second is to put a bit of effort into researching who you are contacting. The third is to not be ‘that guy’ and make me write a fairly embarrassing blog posts dedicated to you.